Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A drunk friend who still deserves your care — that analogy anchors Ven Jampa Gendun’s 39-minute examination of “pleasant love,” the steady affection that persists whatever another person’s outward behaviour. He builds a case that Buddha nature — latent goodness in every being, analogous to the Christian idea that all are children of God — gives love an unconditional rational foundation, quoting both the Prayer of St. Francis and a Japanese hermit poet alongside Tibetan Buddhist teaching. A sustained thread is self-compassion: ego-driven internal conflict makes us feel unworthy of love, but that worthiness is never earned and never lost. The session closes with a guided loving-kindness meditation that expands from oneself through a liked person, a neutral person, and an enemy, then outward through all of Adelaide, Australia, and infinite space.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 3 PA 1988 08 05.mp3
UUID: 6c0393c3-0354-41ce-ad27-3db8de8cf080
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1988-08-05
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 39.3 minutes
Words: ~3,076
All the various expressions of religion and spirituality join in stressing the importance of nurturing love and compassion in the development of spirituality. Our own human experience supports the urgency and necessity for developing and actualizing love and compassion. The mind which is disconnected from the heart lacks the vision of interconnectedness and lacks the power of inner transformation. How often do we need to see our resolutions fail, our glorious progress corrupt our society and rape our planet before we hear the message that our minds need to be attuned to our hearts and grounded in a vision of connectedness if the power of our minds is to be used in life enhancing rather than life negating way. Thought alone cannot end the clinging, greed, prejudice, and self centeredness that undermines the balance of our planet and the fundamental structure of human relationships.
Repaying the kindness. And the fourth precept is sometimes called pleasant love, sometimes called affectionate love. You know, an analogy is given. You know, that we have a friend who we’ve known a long, long time, an old friend. We’ve we’ve gone through a lot, all the good times and bad times with this friend.
And the situation arises, for example, perhaps you’re at a party, and your friend gets drinks too much, gets drunk, starts acting stupid. And, you know, perhaps he starts, perhaps he gets angry at you. Maybe even tries to hit you. But all the time you remember the good times that you’ve shared and the kindness that he’s shown you. And so you never return, you know, this behavior with violence on your own part.
You know, always just drunk, you’re thinking to yourself remembering that he’s just drunk, you know. He’s not acting acting the way he normally does. He’s not quite in control of himself. And so thinking in this way, we don’t react with our habitual patterns of anger and violence towards him. Maybe you actually, you know, you throw him over your shoulder and you take him home and you put him to bed and tell him to go to sleep and quit making a fool out of himself.
So, you know, through this, no matter how he may have acted, there’s still in the we keep we’re able to keep sight of the fact of what a fine person we think this guy is, this woman is, you know, whatever, you know, no matter how they’re what are their external superficial behavior. We’re always able to keep in mind, keep sight of how pleasant they’ve been. We always maintain this affection even though they might even try to hit us or hurt us. So this is this is what we’re trying to begin to understand to develop to cultivate in the sense of pleasant love, affectionate love. We can also not only apply it to other sentient beings, but I have tried to emphasize and I’ll emphasize some more, is that we can apply these things to ourselves, the same attitude.
You know, the essence of cyclic existence, the essence of ego is conflicting emotions, you know, which express themselves, for example, as conflict, as guilt, frustration, self contempt, you know, our minds are always in conflict with ourselves, internal conflict. This is like the essence of our dissatisfaction, the essence of our ego. There’s always this internal conflict going on between what we should what we think we should be, who we should be, what we should be doing, what we should be saying, what how we should be, and how we conceive ourselves to be, and what we do do, what we do say. There’s always this discrepancy, always this conflict. You know, only when we begin to fulfill some arbitrary changing standard that we set up for ourselves do we really begin to think ourselves as good, as lovable, worthy of being loved.
Only when we feel this way, when we’ve achieved this arbitrary standard that we set for ourselves, this particular goal, standard of our own measurement, do we really are we able to feel any love for ourselves, that we’re worthy of love? You know, that we temporarily stop hating ourselves? Do we feel able to love others? So this feeling of pleasant love, affectionate love, to feel very deeply that we have been loved irrespective of our conceived, know, our own self conceived worthiness. To feel that we have been loved irrespective of our own self conceived worth.
You know that we always have within us some noble and beautiful qualities. That our essence is in the nature of of a Buddha, of a Christ. And that all sentient beings are constantly showing us kindness. If we can find this, then we have a constant unchanging center within ourselves. Irregardless of the various shifting attitudes, situations, impressions.
You know, no matter what the shifting illusions of our ego, you know, in its fantasy world that we’re constantly recreating, no matter what they may bring, you know, we can stand on the absolute solid ground of our real nature beyond the ideas of good and bad, beyond the ideas of worthiness and unworthiness, lovable and unlovable. And we can begin to relax and act quite naturally. Naturally. My life may appear melancholy, but traveling through this world, I have entrusted myself to heaven. In my sack, three sho of rice by the hearth of a bundle of firewood.
If someone asks what is the mark of enlightenment or illusion, I cannot say. Wealth and honor are nothing but dust. As the evening rain falls, I sit in my hermitage and stretch out both feet and answer. And then trusting oneself to heaven. Now, think trusting in one’s own Buddha nature, in one’s own potential, one’s own noble and beautiful qualities.
Going beyond the dualistic qualities of our ego, constantly shifting, constantly having to reestablish our credentials, our self worth, constantly having to try to prove ourselves to ourselves. The constant battle, the struggle. It’s a very tiring process. So in this process of getting in touch, of getting understanding deeply that there is something within us beyond this dualistic quality of ego, that we are in essence, that we are in nature, Buddha, a Christ, that we have noble and beautiful qualities, that we have love and compassion within us. Then we have to make lots of little leaps, I think.
Lots of little leaps are required. You know, if there’s a possible intellectual reason, you know, some rational reason for loving, it is this. Because we have Buddha nature. This is the heart of the Buddhist approach to loving others. You know, within Christianity, we can say that all beings are in the image of God, that they’re all the children of God, that we’re all brothers and sisters, if you like.
And this is something we cannot be worthy of. It’s something which is never lost, it’s never gained. It’s always by our mere existence. It’s there through all the shifting fantasies of our ego. No matter how low we may feel, no matter what type of garbage mind we may conceive of ourselves, there’s Buddha nature, there’s compassion, there’s wisdom always laying latent within ourselves.
So we have to begin to trust this and get in touch with this. Then there’s no question about whether we’re worthy of love or not. So the goal in cultivating this pleasant love is to allow your mind to feel affection toward every sentient being, you know, whatever their outward behavior is. Unconditioned positive regard, beneath all the superficial appearances, that there is a person, there is a being there, who just like myself wants to be happy, who just like myself has a Buddha nature, has a Christ potential, who just like myself, know, this person was my mother. These are much more deeper levels by which to identify ourselves and other sentient beings, other people.
We can, you know, just like this, our drunken friend, you know, if we can begin to keep sight on that, keep our attention focused on that, keep that in mind, then whatever the outward appearance is, whatever type of way they might relate with us, then we can choose. We’re free from a reactive mind of simply reacting with uncontrolled hatred and anger and violence. So there’s a feeling keeping that in mind, like before your mind’s eye, there’s a feeling of closeness, feeling of gratitude and respect. It’s not that all beings are going to be alike in all respects. They all don’t become kind of indistinguishable from one another.
But that we’re always able to see no matter what situation, no matter what place, no matter at what time, an endearing quality within all beings, in all places, at all times, in all situations, because we’re always keeping sight of some deeper, more meaningful, more profound quality than the exterior, external, superficial qualities which we usually cling to, which we usually judge people by, by which we usually discriminate people by. So it’s a process of mind training. So essentially, you know, when it comes down to it, we like people. We like people. You know, we feel related to people, like a loving family.
The Dalai Lama once said that when he travels around and he first meets a group of people, a new group for the first time, It’s like meeting old friends. It’s like coming home. You know, it’s like, he expresses the idea that it’s like, you know, even when he meets the person for the first time, it’s as if he’s known this person for a long, long time. He understands who they are. There’s a feeling of relatedness, of intimacy.
So, you know, love is simply the wish, May you be happy. You know at present we feel this toward some people, some of the time in some situations. So our goal is to cultivate this feeling such that it rises spontaneously toward all people, all sentient beings, in all situations, at all times. There’s no reason why we can’t. The quality is there.
It’s just a matter of extending it, developing it. It’s not that this is what Lama Yeshe is trying to emphasize, that we have this quality of being able to love. If we didn’t have this quality to begin with, then we would never there’s no way we can sort of get a transplant, a love transplant. It’s there. We have the quality of compassion, of wisdom.
We have these qualities. Now it’s simply developing what is already there, the seeds, creating the conditions. So we all have love, and we have to develop that quality. So initially, we can begin with merely saying words, know, May this person have happiness and the causes of happiness. Now these words aren’t love.
There’s no question about that. But these words are a way we can begin to induce the states of love, feelings of love, actual love. And eventually there’s no reason why we can’t feel spontaneous and universal love. There’s no reason. There’s no permanent obstacle.
It’s just a matter of effort and cultivation. So, you know, if we begin to see the necessity and make the effort to love others, we can begin to heal the wounds within ourselves, and the wounds of isolation, fear, and self hatred. You know, I try to over and over again emphasize, you know, people want to be loved. People want to feel wanted. There’s a saying that, you know, if you’re not a stranger’s friend, who will be?
That the world is very much a reflection of our own inner attitudes. How we feel about ourselves, you know, is how you’re going to feel about others. And how you feel about others is going to be how you feel about yourself. So this is Oh, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
So I think, you know, from a Buddhist context, the primary teaching of Christ does not mean, you know, love your neighbor as you love yourself. But in the same way that we love our neighbor, that we treat our neighbor, that we feel towards sentient beings, we will love and treat ourselves and feel towards ourselves. In the same way that we wish others to be happy, that we find them pleasant and beautiful, that we respect them, we wish our own self happiness, and we find our own self pleasant and beautiful, and respect ourselves. And in doing this, we’ll find our nose ourselves no longer isolated, no longer in conflict, and no longer filled with self hatred. You know, it’s as if how we relate with others is how we relate with ourselves.
In a way, we have no choice If we ever want to be happy, if we ever want to be at peace, we have to love others because we have to love ourselves. And the way we can begin is by loving others. We’ll stop there. And we’ll meditate on loving kindness. Think about your some of your problems, difficulties, and the fact that you want to be happy.
No matter what you may have done in the past, no matter what mistakes you may have created, you can simply regret them and as best you can determine not to repeat them again in the future. And however you may conceive of yourself, however whatever identity you may hold to, you can change. You can become anything that you want to be. We have to become friends with ourselves. We have to develop some compassion for ourselves.
Be gentle with ourselves and wish ourselves well, wish ourselves happiness. So simply direct some positive feelings towards yourself. May I be happy? May I not suffer? May I grow?
Feel good about yourself. Wish yourself well. You’re worthy of happiness. Now think of someone that you like, that you love, someone of the same sex, and imagine that person in front of you. Remember all the good times that you shared, all the happiness, all the kindness that this person has shown you.
Begin to radiate out the positive feelings which naturally arise. Feelings of caring and concern, just wishing happiness. May you be may you be happy. Now think of someone you neither like nor dislike, someone you feel indifference towards. Imagine that person in front of you.
Try to go beneath the superficial appearances that we usually judge people by, that we usually cling to. Try to see the essence of that person. There’s someone there who wants to be happy and doesn’t want to suffer, just like yourself. There’s someone there who is in nature of a Buddha just like yourself. Just as we wish our own self happiness, not to suffer.
Direct those same positive caring feelings toward this person. It’s very much a reflection about how we feel about ourselves deep down. How do we feel about essential person since we’re exactly the same? Wish them some happiness. Now think of someone who you have problems with, someone who disturbs your mind, someone you don’t like.
Imagine that person in front of you. This person wants to be happy and doesn’t want to suffer just like yourself. And perhaps their way of finding happiness and eliminating their suffering is in conflict with yours. It’s just a conflict of self interest. You’ve done the same thing in the past, either intentionally or unintentionally.
You’ve hurt others to find the happiness that you were looking for. This person has done the same to you. Just for this moment, Set aside your grudge, your hurt, your anger, and see someone that’s just like yourself. Someone who wants to be happy and doesn’t want to suffer, trying the best they can to get some happiness out of life, being confused about how to go about it, making many mistakes along the way, and wish them the happiness just as you would yourself.
Imagine all four of these people together yourself and these three others. And try to see them as all equal from the perspective of wanting happiness, not wanting to suffer, from the perspective of all having Buddha nature. Exactly the same. Without any feelings of bias, radiate out positive feelings equally to all four, wishing them happiness. And all the people in this room searching.
Trying to take some responsibility for their lives, for their happiness, trying to understand themselves, trying to develop some wisdom, compassion. Wish everyone in the room success, wish them happiness. And all the people on the block eating, cooking, going to bed, watching television, reading the paper, whatever they’re saying, whatever they’re doing, do it and say it because they think it’s going to bring them happiness. Radiate out the wish touching everyone on the block. Wishing them that they find the happiness that they’re looking for.
Spreading out further, extending out to all of Adelaide, all the people on the streets and cars and buses and their homes. Further and further, opening your heart for all of South Australia, all the people, animals, insects. Further and further extending out Alice Springs, Perth, Darwin, Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Hobart, the entire country. Further and further, opening your heart, mind, extending radiating out New Zealand. The entire southern hemisphere.
Enveloping the entire world in your heart, your caring concern, your wish that they’d be happy, all the people black, white, red, yellow, all the animals, the insects, Everything that lives on the earth is touched. But with the wish that they’d be happy. Radiating out in all the directions of space. Without limit, extending out further and further beyond imagination. So finally without any boundaries, without any center is the wish pervading all of infinite space.
May all things be happy. May all things be happy. We dedicate the positive energy that we’ve created. Through these merits, may I soon attain the enlightened state of Guru Buddha, and may I lead every migrating being without exception to that state. May the precious bodhicitta not yet born arise and grow.
May that born have no decline, but increase forevermore.